Posts Tagged ‘Designed-by-Evolution’

In this video, designer and artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg explains how design could have impact on science and how synthetic biology inspires her for designing the cars of the future, made from biological materials.

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Bruce Sterling is a prominent science fiction writer and a pioneer of the cyberpunk genre. His cyberpunk novels Heavy Weather (1994), Islands in the Net (1988), Schismatrix (1985), The Artificial Kid (1980) earned him the nickname “Chairman Bruce”. Apart from his writings, Bruce Sterling is also a professor of internet studies and science fiction at the European Graduate School. He has contributed to several projects within the scheme of futurist theory, founded an environmental aesthetic movement, edited anthologies and he still continues to write for several magazines including Wired, Discover, Architectural Record and The Atlantic.

In the interview below, we had the honor of hosting Bruce Sterling in our Next Nature Network headquarters to talk to him about the concept of the convergence of humans and machines. Sterling weighs in on the issue with a rather challenging perspective.

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Life would normally continue with humans and their evolving surroundings, but this movie envisions what could happen if we would just disappear.

Humanity made a strong impact on the planet, but we should not underestimate the incredible power of nature. With our disappearance, animals that depend on us will suffer drastic population declines. At the same time, without human presence on Earth, some animal species that are close to extinction would suddenly grow in population. Most of our remains will decompose because of nature power initiated by fire, weeds and termites. The only thing that would remain of us would be our trash of plastic, chemicals and radioactive material. But of course the question is, why would we all of a sudden disappear?

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Satellite images of Earth at night evoke ambiguous feelings: While on a ground level our cities appear as purely cultural artifacts, a traveler from outer space might just as well marvel at them as beautifully glowingorganic fungi-like structures that sprouted on our planet. Less than a millennium ago, the Earth at night was all dark. Today it is all glowing and blossoming.

Scientists think the laws governing the structure of galaxies in outer space are the same laws underlying the growth of cities. Henry Lin and Abraham Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics have used models for showing how galaxies evolve based on matter density to propose a unifying theory for scaling laws of human populations.

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We increasingly depend on car technology designed to make driving easier and safer. Therefore, can be said that these improvements are creating less-skilled drivers?

“Technological crutches like GPS are making us not only worse drivers – they could also be making us stupid. Technology wasn’t supposed to work that way. Manufacturers have supported drivers with power steering, cruise control, antilock brakes and electronic stability controls. Then they gave us sophisticated on-board computers that power car entertainment systems and fine-tune our cars’ performance on the go. Today we drive sleek, aerodynamic vehicles with more computing power than early Space Shuttles.”

We’ve already seen GPS lead people into some ridiculous situations.
But can we blame the GPS for this, when we follow directions that are totally contrary to good sense?

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Bioengineer Drew Endy shares his idea of biology as a precision manufacturer that could potentially transform civilization as we know it.

“There is this natural technology out there in the wild that is so capable of manufacturing stuff that it coats the surface of the Earth. It takes atoms from the atmosphere and light from the environment and self-assembles huge structures with atomic precision.”

According to Endy the only option we have is to embrace a synthetic biological future, to change the way we live, manufacture and consume. “We are destroying environments, we are critically ripping away biodiversity; it’s a disaster” he states. “We actually have a chance of reinventing civilization”.

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While evidence indicates that humans have been domesticated by technology, we’re not the only primates captivated by modernity. A Japanese macaque stole a tourist’s iPhone and fiddled around with it like a human would. Animals appreciate technological innovations as much as we do! Peculiar image of the week by dutch photographer Marsel van Oosten.

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One of the main questions raised by next nature inquires if it is possible to integrated the biosphere into the technosphere. Saying, are there ways to combine the biology with the technology?

An example that makes us say “yes” to this question has been made by designer Teresa van Dongen. She dared to change the interpretation of nature’s functionality, and saw possibilities to use elements of nature as electronics. With a background in biology, she re-interpreted the life’s destination of deep-sea bacteria living on the fish’s skin. The result is the beautiful Ambio: a lamp that lights up by activating the bacteria.

Text by Anne Spaa. This article was originally published on Next Nature Lab

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Domestication of flora and fauna is a concept that humans have been using to control nature in our advantage already since 33000 BC. A nowadays example are ‘house plants’ which have gone through generations of selective breeding to eventually give the best flowers, in extraordinary colours and unexpected shapes.
A usual by-product of domestication is the creation of a dependency in the domesticated organisms, so that they lose their ability to live in the wild. From an animal and plants perspective this could be considered as a deprivation of their right to freedom. Human interventions in the last couple of decades resulted often in a shrinking natural habitat for many species and populations. Being on the edge of extinction, domestication might be their only refuge?

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As technology evolves, what today seems science fiction may become the job market of tomorrow. Experts predict that 60% of employments in the next 10 years haven’t even been invented yet.

Based on social, technological, economic, and environmental changes occurring today, companies such as Canadian Scholarship Trust Plan (CST) and Sparks & Honey recently conceptualized a series of jobs they think are going to be created or become common in the future. Rewilder, nostalgist, digital death manager, shown below a selection of 11 new professions that you may practice one day.

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Historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a journey through the whole human history: from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical – and sometimes devastating – breakthroughs of the cognitive, agricultural and scientific revolutions.

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Following in 16-year old Daniel Burd’s footsteps, who developed a microorganism that can rapidly biodegrade plastic, high schoolers Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao found a way to break down plastics using soil bacteria.

In this TED Talk the two Vancouver students explain how, on just a whim, they came across bacteria in the Fraser River capable of destroying plastics.
While it is exciting to have such young talents discovering plastic eating bacteria, should we fear the rising of a wild and unpredictable next nature?
Via TED

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From stone-axes to mobile phones, throughout history people have given birth to a wide range of technologies. Today, it is almost impossible to imagine a world without technology. Every human being on the planet employs technology of some sort, and every human has to cope with technological change at various points during his or her lifetime. Yet, despite our deep-rooted relationship with technology, most of us are still relatively unaware of how new technologies are introduced, accepted or discarded within our society.